Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (1956) – Review

Of all the shifty, manipulative and duplicitous aliens ever to take a punt at taking over the world during the heyday of 50s science fiction, surely there isn’t a more multifaceted foe as the Body Snatchers. Standing for virtually any metaphor you care to throw at it, Don Siegel’s masterpiece of paranoia has been described as a study of Mccarthyism, an overt fear of communism and a diatribe about the dangers of conformity and the losing of oneself – bit whether you agree with one of these or all of these, there’s one thing we can all reach a mutual agreement on: Invasion Of The Body Snatchers is damn creepy.
While there’s an understandable urge to lean towards the far more overtly bleak strains of Phillip Kaufman’s 70s remake, Siegel’s adaption of Jack Finney’s novel still carries enough wallop to be the quintessential invasion movie of the decade.

A highly agitated man is brought into the emergency room of a Los Angeles hospital ranting and raving like a typical Glaswegian on a Saturday night and after a psychiatrist is brought in to assess him, he relates an unbelievable tale. The panicked man is Miles Bennall and he is a doctor in the nearby town of Santa Mira and barely a few days earlier, things were as normal as normal gets aside from a couple of unrelated instances of townsfolk having a strange, paranoid delusion. It seems that one or two people are suffering from the belief that their loved ones have been replaced by imposters who not only look exactly like them, but also have all their memories too – but when you look them straight in the eye, an indefinable something is most definately off. Miles, being a typical doctor, in a typical town, in a typical sci-fi flick, naturally dismisses it as a small, outbreak of Capgas Delusion and continues to try and woo old girlfriend, Becky Driscoll, who has recently returned to town after a divorce.
However, soon the weird happenstances just keep piling up, with the most bizarre by far being Bennall’s friend, Jack Belicec, finding a dead body in his house that originally has no facial features or fingerprints, but alarmingly soon starts to look like an exact duplicate of him. Before you know it, Bennall comes to a chilling conclusion: Santa Mira is in the midst of an insidiously quiet invasion as mysterious alien pods have been growing duplicate versions of the population while they sleep and replacing them one at a time.
The small cabal of humans that have realised the terrible truth include only Bennall, Becky, Belicec and his wife, and the quartet start to realise that if they don’t get the word out that their quiet little burg has become a haven for unnaturally calm “pod people”, this invasion will spill out way beyond Santa Mira.

Be it the lumbering vegetable man from The Thing From Another World, to the Martian death machines of War Of The Worlds, aliens have tried many, mostly unsubtle, attempts to beat down the human race, but none prove to be as legitimately haunting as the method seen in Siegel’s seminal feature – sure, atomizing buildings and smashing down doors may be far more visceral, but the Body Snatchers’ method just gets under your skin like no other. Just think about it from a psychological perspective – you wake up one morning with the awful, gnawing certainty that your most cherished loved one simply isn’t who they say they are, but there is absolutely no way for you to prove it. Thus this alien imposter gaslights the living shit out of you as you frantically continue to try to convince yourself that it’s you that’s the problem and the second you fall asleep, the giant, unearthly seedpod sitting in the next room guarantees that you are next – and you’ll never see it coming.
It’s something of a universal fear and Siegel, in full paranoia flow, plays it to the hilt by having Kevin McCarthy’s friendly doctor not spot the balance of power in his unassuming town starting to shift from under his very nose in a very alarming direction. To make things extra callous, the main reason Santa Mira’s stand-up Doc is caught napping is that he’s trying to rekindle a romance with an old flame and it’s here where Invasion separates itself from its peers by being so mercilessly hard-edged for a movie made during this period. Not only is the actual takeover of a pod person so fiendishly passive, you wouldn’t even notice if it happened to someone you live with, but there’s no safety net either – the victims don’t get stashed away somewhere in the vain they can be resuscitated for a happy ending, nope, when you’re copied, you are dead, buddy, and your body presumably crumbles away into nothing.

In order to drain every bit of harrowing detail out of this incredibly potent premise, the filmmakers stubbonly refuse to allow any sort of tongue-in-cheek bullshit to interfere with sharing your nerves to the quick by having the pod people act perfectly normally and not fall back on them having obvious, glassy stares or unnecessary robot voices that would give the game away.
As a result, scenes that bore their way into your consciousness are legion – behold as our leads as they stand transfixed as pods lurking in their greenhouse squeeze out frothy copies of themselves or the moment when both Bennall and Becky flee for their lives with the entire population of Santa Mira on their heels. Of course, the greatest moment is that of McCarthy himself, clutched in the grip of sheer panic as he runs up and down a freeway, screaming warnings at drivers as the nonchalantly pass him if as just another nut. Not only is the sight of his gurning, horrified face possibly one of the most iconic, sci-fi images of all time, but his bellowed line reading of “YOU’RE NEXT!!” straight down the camera lens even made it into a wickedly vicious cameo in the original remake.
There’s a train of thought that suggests Invasion Of The Body Snatchers cops out at the very end as the weirdly neat finale sees disaster conveniently averted at the last minute, however the movie is plenty mean enough even without the nihilistic ending that Kaufman went on to hit us with in the 70s. The final – supposedly up-beat – ending seems oddly ineffectual to feel entirely safe and the final fate of Dana Wynter’s Becky is cold as hell, especially when you consider that the original novel ends with the pod people conceding defeat thanks to their limited life spans not being able to withstand a human pushback.

One of the great, all-time, paranoia sci-fi/thrillers, Invasion Of The Body Snatchers expertly fulfills its potential by suggesting that we shouldn’t be watching the skies at all, but instead we should keep our peepers firmly locked on the people around us.

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